Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Ricky,

Absolutely, when working with local businesses like dentists, you should be specifying their location in many areas of their website. These might include title and meta description tags, alt tags, link anchor text, on-page content, and schema-encoded NAP (name, address, phone number) on the footer and contact page of the website. Of course, do this in a non-spammy manner - as Wesley mentions - stuffing is neither necessary nor desirable. Your brick-and-mortar clients will typically be hoping for inclusion in Google's local results for the city in which they are physically located. Google will show these results both to searches who are in that city or who are including that city in their search term. For SABs (service area businesses like plumbers and carpet cleaning companies), again, the client should aim for local inclusion for the city where they are physically located, but organic inclusion for their service cities where they aren't physically located. This is how it typically works.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. So, first step is to be sure your company actually qualifies for local inclusion before you take a step in this direction. Can you say yes to each of the following points?

• The company has a physical address that is not shared with any other business. This cannot be a P.O. Box or virtual office, but must be a real, physical address at which mail can be received.

• The company has a local area code phone number. Not a toll free number. Not a call tracking number.

• The company has face-to-face transactions with its clients, either at the place of business (restaurant, dental office, travel agency) or transacts business at the client's location (carpet cleaning company, landscaper, chimney sweep). Business is not conducted virtually only.

If you can say yes to those factors, then your business qualifies for local inclusion. As far as pitfalls to this, you need to be aware of these:

• As you've stated, people can review the business, but you are correct - they can talk about your company whether you participate in Local or not.

• Google's Local entity is not for the faint of heart. Between constant changes in presentation of data, to numerous ongoing bugs, to competitive sabotage, there is a lot going on in Local that is a pain in the neck to deal with. You've got to stay on top of your listings once you begin. Things change frequently and you need to follow Local SEO news and monitor your listings.

• Before you start creating listings anywhere, but especially in the Google arena, be certain they don't already exist. If they already exist, claim the existent listings rather than creating new ones in order to avoid duplication.

On the positive side, the potentials for increased visibility are awesome and Local is one of the most exciting and lively areas in SEO. If you are just getting into this, I recommend that you read David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors 2012 at http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. This is the industry's premiere annual report. I also recommend that you become a weekly reader of Mike Blumenthal's blog which most of us consider to be the industry's best: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. Finally, I recommend that you study Google's own guidelines thoroughly before creating anything in their sphere: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528\. These guidelines are still labeled as applying to Google Places, but they also apply to Google+ Local, so definitely, study them.

Hope these tips help!

Miriam

Hi Mememax,

Good question and you're getting some good feedback here. Honestly, what these business owners need to do is have a website, even if it's only a single page. Barring this, Google will show their Google+ Local page as their home base these days, but having these listings link to their page on a directory site is not something I would recommend. Even if the business is broke and wants to set up a generic, free WordPress.com (not .org) site, that would be preferable to any arrangement that puts the control of their home base on the web in any other person's hands.

I'm a strong advocate of clients owning everything in their name, even if it's just a freebie website to start out with. And, as the website is such a HUGE local search ranking factor, modern business owners have got to understand that having the best website they can afford is a must, not an option, if they want to compete and use the web as a tool that drives business to their business. If they can't manage to make this investment, they will be left behind. That's just the way things are now, so it may be that the best thing you can do is make them understand that their primary investment needs to be in getting a website before they even consider where to list themselves. Hope this perspective is helpful!

Hi Blair,

One of the inherent tasks of manual citation building is ensuring that verification takes place. There is no way to get around this. It goes with the job. Pre-set your clients' expectations that they will need to be part of the process - forwarding you verification emails that come in, being by the phone at a certain time when phone verification calls come in, being on the lookout for postal mail verification and letting you know when it comes in. Yes, this can be time consuming, but it's what clients pay a professional citation builder for.

In regards to things like security questions, go ahead and make up your own answers to them. Then, at the end of the project, be sure to present the client with a document for their files that lists all of the questions and answers so that they have them on file. This is very important for their future needs - they may need to edit their profiles or may work with other marketers who need to and they must have a record of the work you've done.

I create a simple spreadsheet that tracks all of this information, including listing status, passwords, security questions, etc. Once you've built citations for a few clients, you will become familiar with which sites have which requirements and can build a templated spreadsheet for this so that all you have to do is fill in the blanks as you progress through the work. This will help you with keeping track of your own tasks and the sheet can then be given to the client at the end of the project so that they have a simple document to refer to that contains all of their citation info.

Hope this helps!

Hi Greenhornet77,

Good question. Schema and hCard both work. I used hCard for several years on all my local clients' sites, but I've transitioned now to Schema because of the agreement between all search engines that it's readable by them. If Schema is new to you, check out this generator:

http://schema-creator.org/

For local businesses, be sure you start by clicking the 'organization' tab in the left nav. You have a choice of course, and to date, hCard still appears to be working fine, but a lot of SEOs were ticked when Google stopped supporting geoSitemaps (see: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/28/google-still-supporting-kml-files-but-not-the-use-of-geo-sitemaps/), and perhaps they may be less inclined in future to abandon schema because it's supported by multiple engines. Just a thought.

Hi IOSC,

Great question, and a really important point from Keri regarding never soliciting Yelp reviews from your customers. Their policies and filters are the most stringent of any review platform; Yelp wants all reviews to happen spontaneously.

When it comes to Google-based reviews, the best policy is to take it slow. Avoid sending out email blasts or running campaigns that will generate a large number of reviews at any one time. Google has also upped the stringency of their review filters of late and too great a velocity of incoming reviews can result in review loss for the business owner. Ask, perhaps, 1-3 happy customers a week if they'd like to review you. Then, if 1 or 2 of them do, this will be a gentle acquisition.

Also, take a look at your competitors' average number of reviews. If most of them in your locale have, say, 20 Google-based reviews, then aim for having 30 or 40 on your profile...don't aim for having 200. This is another area in which it is speculated that Google may become suspicious that reviews are being bought or falsely generated by the business.

A read through Google's Review Posting Guidelines will be very important for you:

https://support.google.com/places/answer/187622?hl=en

Another good step is to, again, look at your direct local competitors and see which 3rd party review sites Google is linking to from their Google+ Local pages in the 'reviews from around the web' section. This way, you may discover that, for your locale and industry, Google seems to be trusting certain sites like citysearch, judysbook or insiderpages most. This will signal to you that it's important for you to have customers review you there.

In actually setting about requesting reviews, a good process would be to obtain the customer's email at the time of service. Follow up 2-3 days after a service is rendered with a brief, friendly, well-crafted email, letting the customer know how much you would appreciate his review. You might list a few places (not including Yelp) where you have review profiles and let the customer know that you would like them to pick their favorite platform. While Google and Yelp reviews are typically the most important for local business owners, review diversity is very healthy insurance against massive review loss, should you ever lose all of your reviews on one site or another. Remember, not everyone is going to have a Google account, so leaving a Google based review could be a pain for them, whereas if they are an active member at TripAdvisor, their review their will be easy for them and good for your business.

I recommend you read Phil Rozek's 2012 post on the local review ecosystem to get a quick education on the way in which data is shared between some of the review platforms (http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/07/06/the-local-business-reviews-ecosystem/). Great piece!

Hope I've pointed out some helpful ideas for you here. Just remember, a slow, diverse and steady acquisition of reviews over time is a much better strategy than trying to make a big splash all at once.

Hello C Smith,

Like your avatar.

Okay, so here's the thing: 'web design' is not actually a local query, due to Google's handling of this niche. I believe it was in January of 2010 that they stopped showing true blended/local/pack-type results for web design queries, so your approach to this is basically going to be organic, in terms of SEO, rather than what you'd be doing if you were a shoe store in Birmingham.

If you're located in Birmingham and your goal at this point is to attract Birmingham-based businesses, then I would imagine your whole website (not just a landing page) would make frequent mention of Birmingham and the businesses you serve there.

But, as Owen has rightly pointed out, it is better to use a light hand in this. Don't go overboard. Write titles, tags and text that read naturally. Remember, you don't have to string your phrases together every time. In other words, you don't have to write:

Birmingham Alabama Website Design Services

over and over again.

A paragraph might contain the words 'Birmingham' and 'Website Design' and 'Services' and 'Alabama' within it, of course, but they don't have to be stuck all in a row with glue:)

Between Panda, Penguin and EMD issues over the past year, Google is very clearly moving towards a preference for naturalness. So, using a gentle touch is going to serve you better in the long run, both as far as human users and search engine bots are concerned.

Hi There,

Thanks for asking about this! Citation building is all about physical location, with the end goal being appearing well for the city in which a business is physically located. Whether you build citations manually or use a more convenient option like Moz Local, it is always going to be about physical location rather than service radius. Other marketing strategies must be employed by service area businesses hoping to gain visibility in geographic regions in which they have no physical presence. Citation building should strengthen your position where you are physically located, but for non-physical geographies, you will likely need to work on things like this:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hope this helps!

Greetings Fidelity One!
Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. If am correctly understanding your description of your business as being a virtual one, then this is not a question of rankings but rather one of appropriateness. Virtual businesses are not deemed to be Local by Google.

In order to qualify as local, you must have a real physical street address (not a P.O, box or virtual office, a unique local area code phone number and a legal business name. Clients must either come directly to the street address to do one-on-one business with you or your staff must depart from the physical street address to do business with clients (as in the case of chimney sweeps, carpet cleaners, etc.)

If any of these criteria do not fit your business model, then Local just isn't the right space for you.

Hope this helps!

Hi Danny,

Seconding what Christy has explained, and also, think you might want to read this post by Mike Blumenthal:

http://localu.org/blog/merge-google-pages-usually-cant-now/

I believe you may find some ideas in there that will help you with what is going to be a major strategical planning session. Wishing you the best of luck!

Hi Zachary,

Good question! You are quite right...Google has never publicly outlawed usage of geo terms in the business description field. Advice against this comes from Local SEOs who have seen this practice ding listings. In conversation, I've heard top Local SEOs I know say it can ding a listing anywhere from 4 to 20 positions in the local serps. It's a hidden, not-publicly-acknowledged penalty. So, definitely don't do this. I think the best use of the business description is as an elevator pitch. For example, if a business has won awards locally (Voted best local clinic by Community Magazine), that's a great USP. Figure out what the USP is and put that in the description, exclusive of geo terms.

Will you see live exceptions to this in the SERPs? Yes. Google doesn't catch everything. But you know Google...if they do catch you, punishment is swift and awful.

Thanks for asking your question. So many people are unaware of this hidden penalty.

Hi Abe,

Good question. While I believe that the two most important places for most local businesses to earn review are Google+ Local and Yelp (because of their obvious dominance), these are not necessarily the best places for you to request reviews, namely because it's forbidden by Yelp's quality guidelines to solicit reviews, as Keri has mentioned.

When you have the opportunity to steer a customer towards leaving a review, a Google-based review is likely to have the most ranking-oriented impact, if the customer already has a Google+ account. If he doesn't, there's a chance the review may be filtered out.

If the customer is an active Yelp user and leaves you a Yelp review without being asked, then this can have a good impact on conversions. I know many local business owners swear by Yelp as a major driver of phone calls.

Clients in certain industries may see next-best benefit from niche directories, rather than generic ones.

I highly recommend that you read Phil Rozek's extremely awesome post/infographic comparing review sites in 2013.

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/10/24/comparison-of-local-review-sites-where-should-you-focus-now/

I think you'll find it's just what the doctor ordered!

That's a very good question, Kathy!

I believe the section of the guide you're referring to is here: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

And what that section  is saying is that, if you're an SEO and you have this client who sells ice cream coming to you, here are some questions you can ask them to start learning about their business. This framing assumes that the client knows their own business from selling their products, serving the public and hearing their FAQs, and, possibly having something like Google Analytics hooked up to their website so that they have some demographic/seasonal information in place to share with the SEO.

For you, if you're doing your own marketing for your own business, this is going to come down to you knowing your own business, its customers' FAQs, etc. If you don't yet have any anayltics set up to track traffic coming into your website, now would be a good time to start gathering such data via Google Analytics which is free.

I would also recommend that you:

• Start formally logging your customers spoken/written FAQs. This would include in-person/phone/form questions you frequently receive that help you understand what customers are looking for and how they word their questions in relationship to your company's goods/services. For example, if you sell clothing, do your customers ask questions about "plus size blouses" or "plus size tops"?

• Do searches directly in Google for your products/services. Then, look on the results page for the section titled "Searches Related to (X)" There, Google is showing you a bunch of terms related to the search you've performed.

• You can also try a similar technique by going to Google and typing in a search phrase slowly, letter by letter, to see what other phrases come up in the search box dropdown as you type. For example, when I type "women's blouses" in slowly, Google also shows me "women's blouses for work", "women's blouses on sale", etc. This lets me know customers are looking for these things.

• Go to AnwerThePublic.com and do searches surrounding your products/services to see how people ask search engines questions about these things.

• Go to Google Trends and type in your products/services to see if there are hot topics surrounding these things. For example, Google is telling me that "women's lace tops" are currently trending in NY.

A combination of efforts like these will help you pull together a lot of keyword phrases of possible value to your business and its clientele. Once you have these, you can then further investigate the value by using more sophisticated tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, so that you can prioritize and organize your research and create a strategy from it.

Hope this helps!

Hi Alan!

Good question! Provided that each physical location has its own local phone number, then citation building (the practice of building listings on local business directories) is almost certainly going to be an appropriate part of your marketing strategy. When dealing with 200 locations, the use of tools and services that can automate at least some of the process for you will be a tremendous time-saver.

Moz Local is one such service. In order to use this service, you will need to have either a unique Google+ Local page or Facebook Place page for each of the physical locations, already in place. As Ray-pp has mentioned, you should take advantage of Google's bulk upload, which allows you to create a .CSV of all listings and upload them all at once, rather than building 200 individual listings by hand. The good news is, if your Google .CSV is formatted properly, you can also use it in our system So, you'd want to get the Google listings in good order and then, once they are live and verified, upload the same .CSV to Moz Local. This will likely save you a tremendous amount of time in getting the listings pushed out to our 7 supported partner sites, which are some of the most important local data sources on the web.

Hope this helps!

Hi Alex,

Though the display has changed from Places to +, the work is basically the same. The aspects of Local SEO that have the most impact and over which you have total control are:

• The strength and optimization of your website

• Citation building

• Social Media participation

• Linkbuilding

• Avoiding violations of various guidelines

The important aspect over which you have some control is:

• Review acquisition

Other important ranking aspects over which you have little or no control are:

• Age of domain/citations/links

• Proximity to centroid

• Competitors' efforts

If the goal is to move from #3 to #1, you can work to make a superior effort in the first 2 sections of my above list in comparison to the efforts of competitors and hope that this pays off, but the third section of my list is not something you can control. If competitors are older, closer to centroid or making a greater effort, these aren't things you can control, making outranking them quite difficult.

While these recommendations are more or less the same as I would have given prior to the changeover to Google+, people are blogging about their findings as Local changes and grows. If you want to catch up on some of these issues, there are 3 blogs I would recommend you peruse. Go through the posts on these blogs for the past 3-4 months:

blumenthals.com/blog

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/

These are my top 3 picks for really good coverage of the issues, and the three authors also happen to be Google And Your Business Forum Top Contributors, so they not only have their eyes on the ball, they have a special perspective because of their interactive relationship with Google itself.

Hope this helps!

Excellent discussion going on here, ladies and gents! I am so impressed by the deep questions and answers present here. Our community makes me proud!

Ruben, I'd like to bring up a couple of things to add to this good topic.

1. You might like to read my Moz Post http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide which covers the concept of building out pages for various locations in some depth.

2. Citations are a big part of the picture - absolutely! They serve 2 main functions which are a) to help customers find you on a wide variety of platforms and b) to build a consistent, trustworthy body of information about your business on the web, which is then crawled by search engines, causing them to have confidence in the cluster of data they have about your business which can then increase your chances of being considered a relevant answer for certain queries.

So, it's a 1-2 punch kind of thing, building citations. There are direct benefits in a customer finding your listing on a site like Superpages and indirect benefits in the consistency and prevalence of your citations helping search engines to feel confident about the validity and prominence of your business.

This being said, it's my belief and understanding that it takes time for validity/prominence to actually start affecting rank. Every local business platform has its own schedule for taking a citation from zero to live, and then I have to think about search engine bots picking this up and stirring it around in the bucket in which they've got all my other business data. Then, I have to take into account whether my citation building has, in fact, surpassed what my direct local competitors have done or has simply brought me on par with them, meaning citation building will not be the difference-maker I'd love it to be, because my toughest competitors have done the same thing I have (meaning, I'm going to have to find some other way to distance myself from the field).

In sum, citation building is a must-do for any local business that doesn't want to fall behind in their niche, but it takes time to see the positive effects from it and the level of positivity is going to directly relate to the stiffness of the competition. You are in a tough market - law in major cities, which I would consider one of the most difficult ranking environments. Yes, you've got to get those citations in good shape, but my honest appraisal of this is that you are going to have to go way beyond these basics to surpass what is doubtless a highly active/ heavily marketed competitor base. The usual advice of build excellent content, implement on-page Local SEO, build citations, earn reviews is going to be common to all your competitors', so finding something that they're not all already doing may be necessary to see yourself rise in the SERPs by dint of some extra creative, superior effort.

Hope these thoughts are helpful! Glad you brought up this topic, and I hope once Moz Local has had a few more months to bake in the oven, we'll be able to publish some case studies that prove a correlation between participation and positive results!

Hey Bob,

I like VZpro's answer on this one. One area I always try to take advantage of is that some directories allow for a much longer business description than others. At the beginning of a citation campaign, I write descriptions of different lengths so that I have them at the ready for using on the different platforms. Those longer description field allow for a very robust (and optimized) description of the business, so that's something I never pass up.

Greetings, Bede,

So sorry about the line breaks. We've been having a little problem with that, and I hope my response to you isn't one big paragraph

The process you have been using for your Local clients remains a best practice, in my experience. Not only does this separate the information out as best you can for bots, but it is a good practice for human users who will be signaled upon reach such a landing page that they are looking at information about their own geographic location. You are so right that things keep changing in Local, but this is one area in which creating unique, rich content landing pages is still a smart choice.

In regards to Schema vs., for instance, hCard, the benefit is that Google, Yahoo & Bing have all agreed on this markup as standard. However, definitely read this 2011 discussion at Mike Blumenthal's blog in which Mike opines that rushing to switch from hCard to Schema may not be your #1 top priority:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/10/07/a-free-tool-to-build-geo-sitemap-and-schema-org-compliant-files/

Through 2011, I continued to use hCard on my Local clients sites without issue, but it is certainly smart to acquaint yourself with the features of Schema that apply to Local. The tool linked to from that post is a great place to begin.

Hope my feedback is useful!

Miriam

Hi Cornelius,

According to Phil Rozek's 2013 post on hidden addresses (http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/), yes, Yelp does permit you to hide your address. I haven't seen any news in the past year indicating that this policy has changed in the interim. I have never seen a study, however, documenting what effect on internal Yelp rankings using a hidden address may have, if any - somebody should totally do one! Hope this helps!

Hi Jonathon,

Unfortunately, I am still seeing issues on your Google+ Local page, as we saw when you previously posted the client's business. I recommend you go back and review the answers you received on those previous threads to be sure you've made every effort to remedy possible problems.

I want to clarify one thing here - if a client is a home-based SAB, they do not have to put their address on their website. They only need to enter in the dashboard of those platforms that allow the address to be hidden. It needs to be a legitimate address that is being entered, but you don't have to put it on the website.

Is this ideal? No. Why? Because Google will have the address in their dashboard and will come to the website looking to verify its accuracy. If there is no address listed there, then Google has less data to go on, so that is less than ideal, but is a reality for many home-based businesses. If your client has competitors with public studios who are able to show their addresses on their website, we might guess that they have a bit of advantage over your client, because their NAP is more easily cross-referenced by Google. But, I did want to chime in here to say it's not absolutely essential to publish an address on the website.

As Marcus has mentioned, citation cleanup is going to be essential here, due to the past existence of a type of address that was a violation of the Google Places Quality Guidelines. It's good you've gotten started on this. It can take some time for Google to re-index your corrected citations, so you may need to wait a bit to see the benefits of having made that effort. I will stress - you must be totally thorough in this work. Even one bad citation can breed multiple bad listings across the web because of the way data is shared in the local search ecosystem.

Like Robert, I am positive your heart is in the right place trying to help this client. You've received an enormous amount of feedback here at Moz from the whole community about this client - that's what we're here for! - and I hope you've been able to implement some of my previous advice about learning as much as you can about Local SEO in order to be better able to advise local business owners like this one. I provided a variety of learning resources on a previous thread of yours, and I hope you are checking those out on a regular basis. Local is definitely an on-going learning process for everyone involved in it.